Book series: The Writer's World

The Writer’s World features writers from around the globe discussing what it means to write, and to be a writer, in many different parts of the world. Each book offers a window into a particular culture with diverse traditions, landscapes, and political climates, reminding us that in an increasingly fractured world, literature transcends national boundaries and helps us understand our shared human experience. The Writer’s World collects a broad range of material from a rich variety of voices, many of whom appear in English for the first time.

The series is edited by Edward Hirsch, an internationally acclaimed poet and critic, and the president of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation.

The pieces collected in Mexican Writers on Writing present a cross section of Mexican authors’ thoughts on writing, from Carlos Fuentes’s instructional Decalogue, to Bernardo de Balbuena’s flowery dissertation on the beauty of poetry, to Octavio Paz’s analysis of the essence of translation. From the time of the chronicles of the conquistadors to the contemporary movement Crack, these writers reveal ever-changing views...

Nineteenth-Century American Writers on Writing features essays, letters, poems, prose, and excerpts of interviews by fifty-seven writers of the century, including Ralph Waldo Emerson, Edgar Allan Poe, Herman Melville, Fanny Fern, Ulysses S. Grant, William James, and Frances Harper. Each of these writers confronted what it meant for a literature to be defined as “American” during a century rocked by the industrial...

A strong pick for any literary history collection with a focus on American literature. — Midwest Book Review

With more than half the works appearing in English for the first time, Chinese Writers on Writing features authors such as Mo Yan, whose book Red Sorghum was made into an award-winning movie by the same name, Lu Xun, known as the Chinese George Orwell, and Gao Xingjian, the recipient of the 2000 Nobel Prize for Literature. This is the first collection to bring together material by writers reflecting on their work,...

A seminal work that helps increase a critical understanding of Chinese writing and literary aesthetics free from official ideology, Chinese Writers on Writing invigorates... — Greta Aart

Hebrew Writers on Writing begins in early twentieth-century Warsaw, wanders through the formative years of Hebrew modernism in Europe and Palestine, and comes to engage the charged complexity of contemporary Israel. In the process, it explores, as no English volume has before, the shifting cultural and political landscape out of which the literature emerges and provides readers with an intimate vision of a startlingly...

What does it mean to be a writer in the context of Ireland’s centuries of uncertainty and upheaval? How does an Irish writer define Irish writing? The writers in Irish Writers on Writing, who range from early legends to modern masters, address these questions through their sources: the land, the Church, the past, changing politics, and literary styles. Though the references are multiple, the source is single—the Irish...

Polish Writers on Writing captures the brilliance and originality of a literature rightly considered one of the most important and influential of our time. These writers are branded by the political realities of their country—creating literature out of the brutality of the Second World War, under the inhibiting and numbing Communist reign, and finally within a free society, but one burdened by its history. No common...

Vanity doubled by vitality, vulnerability mixed in with force, and the fear of dissolution intimately linked with the desperate pride of defeating historical time confer upon Romanian literature a special tension, born from wandering and threat. The eighty-one writers gathered in Romanian Writers on Writing explore this unsettling tension and exemplify the powerful, polyphonic voice of their country’s complex...

A brilliant publishing enterprise. One of the best elements in American culture is a genuine, welcoming interest in writing from other languages. Beginning with essential... — Robert Pinsky